Ipods and irony

Far and away, Playlistâ€™s most popular story is Two-way Street: Moving Music Off the iPod, a tutorial, as the name hints, on copying music from an iPod to a computer. (Who knew iPod users were so plagued by hard drive crashes that forced them to use these techniques for recovering their music libraries? I mean, why else would you need to do this?)

He’s teasing, I know, but you can count me as an example. I had a hard disk crash and lost all my music files, and had huge problems recovering them from the iPod.

jquiggin – my wife’s ipod has crashed a couple of times however the songs, playlist and artwork are all on the computer that you use to update the iPod. Do you mean the host computer failed? I just back up her music to a USB disk drive every now and then just in case.

Sorry to hear about your ‘hassles’ Christopher. After I download from Emusic (legal, subscription-based alternative music site incl. jazz) onto the computer, I then ASAP burn the lps & songs to CD (legally allowed one copy as Emusic pays the labels)…had the computer crash on me in 2000 & lost hundreds of songs…never want to live thru that frustrating experience again. So can empathise completely. Real bummer.

NP on random: Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children, Xiu Xiu: The Promise, Low: The Great Destroyer, Bjork: Vespertine & Dirty Three: Horse Stories…bliss!

Brand = iPod. There’s the problem. MP3 players *without DRM* are a commodity item now. If you really want your Chinese made, American banded product and still have hassle free transfers of data avoid DRM formats like good old MP3. Seems most ipod users in the UK already do –

jq – “Afraid so, and I was unwisely counting on the iPod as backup for the music files – the work stuff was all properly backed up with several layers of redundancy.”

After many years working with computers I never trust anything. As long as you keep in mind that ALL hard disks will fail eventually you are usually OK. I backup to multiple sources fairly regularly. The biggest hassle I will face if (when) I have a hard drive crash is re-registering all the programs I have bought.

Another way to limit losses is to have 2 hard disks. I have a smaller 40G for my system drive and a larger, now too small, HD for data files. This way a single HD crash will not bring the whole thing to a halt. I think I will carry on this setup on my next PC that I build.

I had a conversation about MP3 players with some teenagers. When I mentioned IPod I was informed with the assurance of the young that everybody knows that they only outlast the year’s warranty period by a number of weeks. They had many examples to give me of the truth of their statement. The advice I was given is never buy one.

As always the iPod FUD flows. My 3rd Gen iPod is still working as well as it always has after 3 years and I am sure that the countless number of people who have no need to complain about the quality of their iPod (as there is nothing to complain about) overwhelms the small numbers who do. Anecdotal evidence would seem to bear this out as not everyone I see with the little white buds stuck in their ears seems to be carrying the latest models. Given the volume of iPod sales there are bound to be some problems out there.

As for losing everything in a hard drive crash on the host PC. For music ripped from CDâ€™s you own this is the perfect opportunity to re-rip at a higher bitrate. For music purchased online, like others have said, backing up is wise, though it seems to be an open secret that a polite email to apple explaining the problem and they will let you re-download anything purchased from the iTunes music store (see: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/itunes/redownload-your-lost-itunes-music-176323.php) .